The crowd didn't part for Ethan so much as flinch away from him, which he supposed was its own kind of parting.
He crossed the square with the coal in his chest sitting up straighter with every step, straining toward the girl on the pole the way iron strains toward a lodestone.
Up close, she was younger than he'd first thought.
Fifteen, maybe sixteen.
The green in her eyes wasn't the steady ember-glow his own carried. It flickered. Guttered. Like something burning through too much fuel too quickly.
"Cut her down," Ethan said to the men holding the torches.
Nobody moved.
A man with a scar running through one eyebrow stepped forward instead, his torch lowered like a spear.
"You're one of them. Taken don't get a say."
"I got burned on that exact pole a week ago."
Ethan nodded toward it.
"And I'm still standing here talking to you, so maybe ask yourself if the pole is working the way you think it is."
That bought him half a second of doubt.
It was all he needed.
He'd said it knowing exactly what it would buy him not a change of heart, not surrender.
Just hesitation.
Enough time for the people who actually mattered to close the distance.
Alistair's coat swept past Ethan's shoulder.
Marguerite was already moving toward the ropes.
And somewhere behind them, Ethan heard Idris's voice.
When had the old man even left the Vault?
He was calling out something in a language Ethan didn't recognize.
The words rolled across the square like something much older than the buildings surrounding it.
Every green-gold ward-lamp flared at once.
The girl's head snapped up.
Not toward the crowd.
Toward Ethan.
The coal in his chest answered.
Kin.
This time it wasn't a whisper.
It wasn't even a word.
It was a formless part of himself straining against the cage of his ribs, reaching toward the girl as though something on the other side of her was pulling it forward.
"Ethan."
Alistair's voice was tight.
"Whatever it wants you to do right now don't."
Ethan barely heard him.
The girl's mouth opened.
The voice that came out wasn't hers.
"Let us out."
It wasn't a request.
Not even really words.
It was pressure behind the teeth, copper and rot and something ancient trying to force itself through a throat too small for it.
The way water forces itself through a crack.
Ethan felt his own coal answer without his permission.
Recognition.
Hunger.
A surge that wasn't his hunger rose through his chest and up his spine, hot enough to make his hands tremble.
For one terrible moment, he thought the coal was going to force the door open itself.
He clenched his jaw.
Then, for the first time since the pyre, he deliberately shut the door.
The coal screamed.
Not audibly.
He felt it.
A wordless fury slammed itself against the inside of his ribs, again and again, desperate to get through.
The girl's back arched.
Her body went rigid against the ropes.
For one terrible second, Ethan thought he'd made the wrong choice.
That shutting the door had cost her whatever chance she had.
His stomach dropped.
Not because of strategy.
Not because of calculation.
Because he was afraid.
Afraid he'd just killed a girl he'd come here to save.
No amount of careful planning had accounted for that.
Then the green in her eyes guttered out completely.
Her body went limp against the ropes.
And she breathed.
Just breathed.
Ordinary, ragged, human breathing.
Ethan stood frozen.
Idris arrived beside them a moment later, his ink-stained sleeve still wet.
"She's not gone," he said.
He examined the girl carefully.
"But whatever you did..."
"I didn't do anything to her."
Ethan looked down at his hands.
They were shaking.
He hadn't realized how badly until that moment.
He slowly curled them into fists.
"I did something to mine."